Saturday, May 9, 2015

A Panama City Beach man has been sentenced to 14 years in prison
after pleading guilty to manslaughter and drug charges in connection
with an accidental shooting last year that killed a new father the same
day he brought his three-day old son home from the hospital, according
to a report in the Panama City News Herald.

Charles Edward Shisler, 62, pleaded guilty to manslaughter,
possession of a firearm by a felon and possession of methamphetamine and
was sentenced Friday, the News Herald reports. The shooting occurred on June 17, 2014, when Shisler told police his
gun went off when he picked it up by the trigger. The bullet traveled
more than 200 feet, through Shisler's window screen, through a stand of
trees and a glass door before striking Steven Justin Ayers in the back
of the head and killing him.

Ayers, a local musician and guitar teacher, and his wife Jessica
brought their first child home from the hospital that day and family
members were gathering for a party when the shooting occurred. Ayers'
son had been born on Father's Day.

"The odds, I'd guess, are one in infinity," Bay County Sheriff's
Office Maj. Tommy Ford said at the time. "This was just tragic."

Friday, May 8, 2015

A man is facing threatening and
breach of peace charges, after police say he pulled out a gun at Stanley
Golf Course in New Britain over a golf etiquette dispute.

Alejandro
Baeza, 22, of Wethersfield, was arrested after course management said
he grew agitated when the group of golfers behind him complained about
the pace his group was playing their game. They said he went to his golf
cart, grabbed a gun and flashed it at the complaining group.

His
permit and his firearm were taken as a result. Players said golf
etiquette is an ongoing issue, but that confrontations should not be
tolerated.

This week marks the two-year
anniversary since Cody Wilson, the inventor of the world’s first 3-D
printable gun, received a letter from the State Department demanding
that he remove the blueprints for his plastic-printed firearm from the
internet. The alternative: face possible prosecution for violating
regulations that forbid the international export of unapproved arms.

Now Wilson is challenging that letter. And in doing so, he’s picking a
fight that could pit proponents of gun control and defenders of free
speech against each other in an age when the line between a lethal
weapon and a collection of bits is blurrier than ever before.

Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along
with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday
filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its
officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint,
they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of
Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to
free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a
3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the
Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its
website.

Link provided by George Jefferson with the following remark: "Looks like Cuomo doesn't get it either‏" As is his custom, he misrepresents what I say, which is quite different from Mr. Cuomo's position (assuming George is referring to me when he says "either")

Chris Cuomo is co-host of CNN’s morning show. He’s also a former law
and justice correspondent for ABC News. He has a law degree from Fordham
University and is a licensed attorney. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is
his brother.

In other words, this is somebody you’d expect would know what he’s
talking about on the subject of basic constitutional facts. And yet:TwitterThis was in response to the shooting outside Pamela Geller’s “Draw
Muhammad” cartoon contest event in Garland, Texas. According to Cuomo,
Geller and her ilk might not have a First Amendment right to express
anti-Muslim speech deemed hateful—it says so, right there in the
Constitution, if we would bother to read it.

Okay, let’s take Cuomo’s challenge. Let’s read the speech part of the
Constitution. (I hope this doesn’t take too long; I hate reading.) Oh,
good, the speech stuff is right there at the beginning of the "things
you can do" section:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

My copy of the Constitution seems to be missing this fabled “except hate speech, none of that” clause.

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Early
one October morning in 2011, two masked men with gloved hands smashed
their way into a roadside pawnshop in rural Georgia, fleeing with 23
handguns.

Four
years later, on a street in Queens on Saturday, a man raised one of
those guns — a silver, five-shot Taurus revolver — and fired three times
at New York police officers. A bullet struck Officer Brian Moore in the face; he died on Monday.

His
death followed the killing of two officers in December in Brooklyn.
That time, the handgun turned on officers also came from a gun shop a
thousand miles away from the city, just 90 miles away in the same
Southern state.

Law
enforcement officials have long focused on Georgia and neighboring
states with looser gun laws as the starting point of a so-called iron
pipeline of guns flowing north, to New York and other cities, where the
restrictions on legal gun purchases are more stringent — and the profits
higher for traffickers.

Open Letter to the Oregon House of Representatives: Planning on voting
for "Universal Background Checks"? The NRA is the least of your personal
worries. The Law of Unintended Consequences, Armed Civil Disobedience,
and Lex Talionis.

Which brings us to you, today. The NRA has sent out a
legislative alert.
You will no doubt be contacted by many, many outraged citizens. Let
me reassure you, this is the least of your personal worries. What you
must remember is that we understand intimately, even if you choose to
ignore it, that the velvet lies of your "good intentions" are wrapped
around the iron fist of the threat of state violence against those who
do not comply. Now this is true of any law you pass -- all are backed
up by the threat of arrest and incarceration and, yes, death at the
hands of the state police if anyone resists your good intentions and
refuses the honor of arrest and incarceration. The thing is, we are not
your average criminals. In fact, we are not criminals at all, no matter
if the last election has placed you in the position of power to declare
us so. However, if you make us criminals, we will be the very best,
most successful criminals we can be. For we will not comply.

For there is a difference, as I have said in speeches in the past,
between "the law" and the rule of law as codified by the Founders'
Republic in the Constitution. Our natural, God-given and inalienable
rights are not subject to negotiation, dilution, diminution or
infringement, by you or anyone else. For us, it is the height of cruel
irony that those of us who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and
the rule of law find ourselves required to become "lawbreakers" to
remain in fidelity to that oath. Again, this is not ground we chose.
Michael Bloomberg and his collectivist fellow travelers, domestic
enemies of the Founders' Constitution, picked this ground. It is ground
we have sworn to fight on, and if need be, die on. The question before
you today is this: Is it ground that YOU are prepared to actually fight
and die on? If we resist your 'good intentions," how many of us are
you willing to see dead in order to enforce your will upon us? And once
we and our families begin dying at the hands of the state police you
send to our doors, can you blame us if your victims return the favor to
the people who sent killers operating under color of law?

Link provided by Flying Junior with the following remarks: You
probably don't have too much time for amateur videos. But check
out this sarcastic open carry guy giving the cops a hard time for
questioning him. Won't give his name. Argues with direct orders from
the police. Keeps harping about the constitution and not breaking any
laws. There is a part two where he gives his play-by-play
rundown of his ordeal in police custody before his wife pays his bail.
You would think that he set this up on purpose, having nothing better to
do
after failing out of the USAF. Does not look old enough to drink a
beer. Had his phone recording everything. Stonewalling the cops just
trying to do their jobs. In part two, he actually recounts telling the
officer driving him to jail that he shouldn't drive while talking on a
cellphone. Begs for contributions to his legal defense fund. Charged
with
displaying a weapon and trespass. Pled not guilty. This is the face
of the NRA. It's not the face of the United States military. This guy
is a down and out.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

A gun safety class at Utah Valley University certainly had a fresh situation to discuss Monday night.

Two
police academy training cadets on their way to the class were involved
in an accidental shooting, leaving one of the cadets with
non-life-threatening injuries.

According to Melinda Colton, UVU
spokeswoman, the incident occurred at approximately 5:20 p.m. It was
reported there had been an accidental discharge of a firearm at the
Education building on the north end of the campus.

UVU police turned over the investigation to the Orem Police Department.

According
to Lt. Craig Martinez with Orem police, one of the cadets was showing
off a new handgun to another cadet. The handgun did not have a clip in
it, and the cadet holding the gun was taking it apart.

"The trigger has to be pressed to take the gun apart," Martinez said. "The cadet didn't know there was a round in the gun."

The
bullet grazed the other cadet's chest. The injured cadet was treated by
fellow cadets until medical personnel arrived on the scene.

The cadet is scheduled to undergo minor surgery today at a local hospital.

Ronnie Howard, 36, has been charged with reckless conduct and second degree cruelty to children in the shooting death of Victor Carroll, according to a sheriff’s office news release.

Howard is the boyfriend of Brooke Carroll, the baby’s mother. Howard was cleaning a gun when it discharged hitting the baby in the face, the news release states.

The couple drove the child to the Medical Center, Navicent Health where he was later pronounced dead.

The shooting occurred at the Hill-N-Dale Mobile Home Park in the 6400 block of Thomaston Road at about 3:30 p.m. The child was pronounced dead at 4:01 p.m., according to Bibb County Coroner Leon Jones.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

IT SHOULD be troubling to
Australian governments that since 1988, after more than 1 million guns
have been destroyed as a result of government buyback programs, numerous
amnesties, voluntary returns, the banning of semi-automatic weapons and
the tightening of gun import controls, the number of guns in private
hands in Australia is as large as it has ever been.

It's not hard to see why. Since 1988, while governments have been runninga
variety of gun control programs, 1,055,082 firearms have been imported
into the country, an average of almost 44,000 a year. As a result, there
are now as many guns in private hands in Australia as there was at the
time of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, when there were an estimated
3.2 million firearms in the country.

With millions of guns in
private hands, it was always going to happen that one day someone would
go on a shooting rampage, and fate chose a pretty place in Tasmania,
where 35 people were killed and another 23 wounded by a lone gunman.

The killings galvanised the then prime minister, John Howard, and
state governments, and after ownership of semi-automatic weapons was
banned and a series of buybacks, the number of guns fell and the risk of
an Australian dying by gunshot fell by more than half.

We are now
back to having more than 3 million guns in private hands. Admittedly,
Australia has more than 4 million more people than it did in 1996, so
the rate of gun ownership is lower, but the number of guns is not. These
figures come from a study by Philip Alpers at the University of Sydney
released this week. Two statistics contained in the study are troubling.
One is that Australia's rate of gun homicides, at 0.13 per 100,000
people, is four time higher than in Britain, where the rate is just
0.03.

Another troubling statistic is the rate of gun homicide in
Switzerland. The Swiss have national military service and an extensive
army reserve program, which means there are guns in most homes.
Switzerland is held up by the gun lobby in support of the adage that
guns don't kill, people do.

It turns out that Switzerland is not
the paragon it appears. The rate of homicides involving guns in
Switzerland is 0.52, four times higher than the Australian rate and more
than double the rates in France and Germany. The only nation that makes
Switzerland look good is the United States, which is so far above all
other advanced economies, with a rate of 3.59 gun homicides per 100,000
people, that it is in a category of its own, with a grisly sequence of
gun massacres to show for it.

Australia's rate of gun homicides is
just 3.6 per cent of the rate in the US, which points to a very
different, less violent gun culture, and successful gun controls. During
the past 25 years, federal and state governments conducted 38 amnesties
that resulted in 728,667 guns being handed back in return for
compensation. Overall, more than 1 million guns were handed in during
that period.

An Oregon bill expanding background checks to encompass nearly all gun
sales in the state made it through the Legislature on Monday, overcoming
obstacles that stymied two previous attempts to pass similar laws.

The measure now heads to Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, who has indicated
support. Her signature would make Oregon the eighth state to require
screening before firearms could be transferred between private,
unrelated owners. No other states have passed such legislation this
year, advocates said.

Monday, May 4, 2015

The Tampa Bay Times examined the effects of Florida’s 2005 law in more than 200 cases (about half of them fatal) through mid-2012. It reported that the law’s chief beneficiaries were “those with records of crime and violence.” Nearly 60 percent of those making self-defense claims when a person was killed had been arrested at least once before; a third of those had been accused of violent crimes in the past; over a third had illegally carried guns in the past or had threatened others with them.

Stand Your Ground claims succeeded 67 percent of the time, but in 79 percent of the cases, the assailant could have retreated to avoid the confrontation. In 68 percent, the person killed was unarmed.

The Wall Street Journal studied “justifiable homicides” nationwide from 2000 to 2010. It reported that these killings increased 85 percent in states with Florida-style laws (some states’ versions of the law were more limited), while overall killings, adjusted for population growth, declined during this period.

Researchers at Texas A&M Universitystudied F.B.I. datato analyze the same 10-year period, and found no evidence that Stand Your Ground laws deterred crimes like burglary, robbery or aggravated assault. But they did find a homicide rate increase of 8 percent (that’s about 600 additional homicides annually) in states with newly buttressed Stand Your Ground laws. A 2012 National Bureau of Economic Researchstudydrew on different data, but also found Florida-type laws associated with a 6.8 percent increase in homicide.

A 7-year-old girl died on Sunday from a gunshot wound to the head in
what police said was an accidental shooting, the Panama City Police
Department reported.

PCPD
received a 911 call at 10:30 a.m. Sunday reporting a child had been shot
at the Andrews Place Apartments, 1914 Frankford Avenue, according to a
police report. Upon arrival, PCPD officers found the girl had been
struck in the head by a bullet fired by her father from a handgun,
according to police.

The child
was transported to Bay Medical Center Sacred Heart, where she later
died, police said. PCPD reported “it appears the shooting was
accidental.” No other details of the incident were initially reported by
the PCPD.

Texas police shot
dead two gunmen who opened fire at an exhibit near Dallas of
caricatures of Islam's Prophet Mohammad organized by an anti-Islamic
group, authorities said on Sunday.

The shooting echoed
past attacks or threats in other Western countries against art depicting
the Prophet. In January, gunmen killed 12 people in the Paris offices
of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in revenge for its cartoons.

Sunday's
attack took place shortly before 7 p.m. in a parking lot of the Curtis
Culwell Center, an indoor arena in the suburb of Garland, northeast of
Dallas. Geert Wilders, a polarizing Dutch politician and anti-Islamic
campaigner who is on a jihadist hit list, was among speakers at the
event.

“When you’re dealing with an active sheriff in the state
of Georgia, there’s certain laws and things that have to be done,” he
said, adding that no charges may ever be filed in the ongoing
investigation. “It’s not like an average citizen when we can take them
to jail for, let’s say, reckless conduct. That’s why we’ve been in
consultation with our district attorney’s office.”

District Attorney Danny Porter told the Daily Post on
Sunday night that detaining a sheriff can be complicated in Georgia.
Porter said he was comfortable with Hill leaving partly because “he’s
not going anywhere,” and that it’s too early to say if charges will be
filed.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Wilson's Mills police have charged a man in connection with the accidental death of an 18-year-old woman.

Police responded to 92 Mitchner Drive for a shooting call at approximately 2:40 a.m. Saturday.When officers arrived, they found a female, Moesha Lockamy, bleeding from a single gunshot wound to the chest.

Officers and EMS workers tried to resuscitate Lockamy, but she was pronounced dead at the scene.Police have charged Lockamy's boyfriend, 42-year-old Derrick Williams, with second-degree murder.Investigators
believe Lockamy and Williams were playing with the firearm when it
discharged. The shooting remains under investigation.

According to arrest records, Williams is a convicted felon and has a history of drug and weapons charges.

A Milwaukee man who briefly became the face of the nascent concealed
carry movement right after he shot an armed robber at grocery retailer
in 2012 now has a week to get rid of all his guns.That's since on
Friday, Nazir Al-Mujaahid was discovered guilty of tax fraud, and the
felony convictions make it illegal for him to possess a firearm, a
consequence his attorney known as "an exceptionally serious punishment"
since of his situations.

Susan Roth mentioned her client has been
threatened and confronted by relatives of the robber he shot and has
ongoing issues for his safety. He plans to appeal Friday's conviction.

Milwaukee
County Circuit Judge Timothy Witkowiak, who presided more than the
non-jury trial final month, stated he discovered the testimony of 3 law
enforcement agents who stated Al-Mujaahid had admitted to filing false
returns extra credible than the defendant's denials. He also noted that a
lot other circumstantial proof, like computer records, tied Al-Mujaahid
to the fraudulent tax returns.